LinkedIn Reported Buying Pulse Newsreader App

LinkedIn will buy the maker of the newsreader app Pulse, AllThingsD reported Monday, citing “sources familiar with the negotiations.”

The acquisition is priced somewhere between $50 million and $100 million, the report said.

Alphonso Labs of San Francisco, which makes the Pulse app for various platforms, has raised about $10 million from Redpoint Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Mayfield Fund, Lightspeed Investment Partners, New Enterprise Associates and Lerer Ventures. It has 20 million users who read more than 10 million stories per day.

Pulse had other suitors as well. Both Microsoft and Yahoo made overtures for an acquisition, and other companies including Facebook, Gannett and Amazon were interested.

The interest in news apps like Pulse, which take news stories shared on social networks or selected by editors and reformat them for smartphones and tablets, has been high among content providers, CNET reports. CNN bought Zite, one of Pulse's competitors, for a reported $20 million in 2011.

LinkedIn already offers a selection of news articles from a variety of sources in its LinkedIn Today section, which appears on both its website and mobile apps, Business Insider notes.

It has also gotten into the business of publishing original content contributed by business leaders like Virgin founder Richard Branson and Meg Whitman of eBay and HP.